Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

Estate of the artist

Diana Diederich Blake (daughter of the artist)

William Hunt Diederich’s fascination with animals, which remained strong throughout his career, developed from his childhood encounters with the horses, stags, and exotic hounds that inhabited his family’s estate in Hungary. In their physical shape and unique characteristics, the artist found a form analogous to his governing aesthetic philosophy, declaring, “Animals seem to me truly plastic. They possess such supple, unspoiled rhythm.” ¹ The graceful lines, fluid movements and inherent nobility of these animals inspired the artist’s distinctive style and resulted in a range of exquisite wrought iron, bronze and paper works.

At the age of sixteen, after studying for a time in Switzerland, Diederich moved to Boston to live with his maternal grandfather, the artist William Morris Hunt. Enrolled at the venerable Milton Academy, Diederich’s restless, independent nature clashed with the school’s traditional academic environment, and before long he dropped out and headed west, assuming the life of a cowboy on ranches in Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. Upon his return to the East Coast in 1906, Diederich began studying sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; however, after two successful years there, producing animal sculptures inspired by his Western experiences, Diederich was summarily expelled for “improper language.” He and Paul Manship, a fellow sculptor he had befriended at the academy, continued their education by traveling extensively in Europe, where iron works from the Renaissance and Baroque eras greatly impressed him. With the outbreak of World War I, Diederich returned to the United States, this time settling in New York, and gradually established a reputation for his innovative sculptures and decorative arts. In 1920, he mounted his first solo exhibition, which consisted of approximately eighty-eight objects, at the Kingore Galleries.

Completed the same year, Fighting Goats depicts a moment of frenzied activity between two horned and bearded ruminants. Standing on its hind legs like a ballerina on point, the posterior goat cranes the uppermost part of its body to the left in an attempt to avoid a blow from the other’s horns. The smooth, curvilinear contours of its abdomen and stylized neck create a pleasing contrast to the sharp angularity of its retracted forelegs and jagged fur. To counteract the other’s vertical weight, the anterior goat is situated horizontally; arching its back and extending its triangular head to the right, the animal stretches its right hind leg far back while lifting its foreleg into the air to create a sinuous, upward motion from right to left. The complex, interlocking arrangement of the animals’ streamlined torsos, limbs and horns produces a wonderful sense of dynamism and fluidity.

Often returning to themes throughout his career and reinterpreting the compositions, Diederich designed the first variant of Fighting Goats in 1917; that early bronze sculpture, now part of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s permanent collection, portrays the goats in a less attenuated, stylized manner. In 1925 he designed a sheet metal and glass lighting fixture (National Museum of Wildlife Art, Wyoming) for which he employed an arrangement nearly identical to this cut-out, only adding jagged delineations of foliage to make the image more abstract. A later treatment of the theme, cast as an edition of three in bronze around 1936, exists in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Situated on a stepped base resembling rocks, the bodies of the fighting goats in the Metropolitan Museum’s bronze are very similar to the ones in this work but are positioned in a less intricate, more linear fashion. Seen in the context of these other objects, the Fighting Goats paper silhouette represents an important moment in the artist’s stylistic development of this theme; clearly finding it to be a highly successful, visually pleasing composition, the artist based his later works on it.